The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a
stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin
Luther King Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.

It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of
absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What
now?

That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers,
Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil rights
movement. He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been at so
many other critical places, recording iconic images of those tumultuous
years.

In addition to photographing moments large and small in the struggle
for black civil rights in the South, Withers had another job. He was an
informer for the FBI, passing along information on the doings of King,
Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Ben Hooks, and other leaders of the
movement. He reported on meetings he attended as a photographer,
welcomed in by those he knew so intimately. He passed along photos of
events and gatherings to his handler, Special Agent William H. Lawrence
of the FBI’s Memphis office. He named names and sketched out plans.

In an exhaustive recent report, the Memphis Commercial Appeal
detailed Withers’s undercover activities, provoking a pained and
complex response from the many who knew him and were involved in the
civil rights movement. His family simply refuses
to believe that the paper’s report could be accurate. On the other
hand, Andrew Young, with King during those last moments, accepts
Withers’s career as an informant, saying it just doesn’t bother him.
Civil rights leaders, including King, viewed Withers as crucial to the
movement’s struggle to portray itself accurately in Jet, Ebony,
and other black journals. In that Withers was successful – and the
rest, Young suggests, doesn’t matter. Besides, he told the Commercial Appeal, they had nothing to hide. “I don’t think Dr. King would have minded him making a little money on the side.”

Activist and comedian Dick Gregory, hearing Young’s comments, turned on
his old comrade. “We are talking about a guy hired by the FBI to
destroy us, and the fact that Andy could say that means there must be a
deep hatred down inside of him,” he said. “If he feels that way about
King only God knows what he feels about the rest of us.”

This is the way it is with informers, so useful to reckless law
enforcement authorities and employed by the tens of thousands as the
secret shock troops of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Surveillance has multiple
uses, not the least of which is to sow mistrust, which in turn eats at
the cohesion of families, social and political movements, and ultimately
the fabric of community itself.

D’Army Bailey, a former Memphis judge and target of FBI surveillance in the 1960s, told the Memphis Commercial Appeal
that the use of informers in everyday life ruptured fundamental civic
bonds, fomenting deep suspicion and mistrust. “It’s something you would
expect in the most ruthless totalitarian regimes. Once that trust is
shattered that doesn’t go away.”

Earl Caldwell, a former New York Times reporter and now a
professor of journalism at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and
Communications at Hampton University, pointed out
that the black community in the South in the 1960s granted a special
trust to black journalists. Indeed, some of those journalists took out
an ad in black newspapers in February 1970 pledging not to spy or inform
or betray that trust.

“If all that we’ve been told through these documents that have been
released, if that’s true, then it puts a … very, very, very heavy,
heavy mark not just on [Withers] and his work but on the trust that the
black journalists made many years ago with the black community,”
Caldwell said.

Keeping Tabs on Americans for Fun and Profit

That was then, this is now. The Withers story is, of course, ancient
history, shocking to many, yes, even though it is well known that FBI
and police informers permeated the movement in general and King’s circle
in particular, and illegal wiretaps and bugs snared even the most
private conversations of civil rights leaders. But few who thought or
wrote about the Withers news found it an especially relevant tale for
our present moment. How wrong they were.

If, amid anti-communist hysterias and social upheaval decades ago,
the U.S. government employed armies of informers and other forms of
often illegal surveillance, government and law enforcement agencies
today are actually casting a far broader surveillance net in the name of
security in a relentless effort to watch and hear everything – and to
far less attention or concern than in the 1960s.

In
fact, a controversy in Pennsylvania has just erupted over secret state
surveillance of legitimate political groups engaged in meetings,
protests, and debates involving subjects of public importance – natural
gas drilling, abortion, military policy, animal mistreatment, gay
rights. Such controversies over domestic political spying have surfaced
remarkably regularly since Sept. 11, 2001 – police and FBI
informers in mosques, Defense Department surveillance of antiwar groups and even gay organizations, National Security Agency illegal wiretapping, and surveillance of groups planning protests
for the political conventions of the major parties. Revelations of such
activities have become almost white noise. All were covered in the
media, but cumulatively it’s as though none of them ever happened.

The Pennsylvania surveillance case,
which is just the latest of these glimpses into the secret surveillance
world of our ever more powerful national security state, does not
directly involve informers (as far as we know). It marks a different
point on what FBI Director Robert Mueller has referred to as the
“continuum” – the whole environment of daily life, really, which in the
post-9/11 world has been appropriated by law enforcement officials in
the name of “terrorism prevention.”

“There is a continuum between those who would express dissent and those who would do a terrorist act,” Mueller said
ominously in a 2002 speech. “Somewhere along that continuum we have to
begin to investigate. If we do not, we are not doing our job. It is
difficult for us to find a path between the two extremes.”

What does that mean? Just last week, FBI agents raided half a dozen homes of antiwar activists in Minneapolis and Chicago,
carting away papers, computers, clothing, and other personal effects,
all in the name of investigating “material support of terrorism.” The
activists, their supporters, and their attorneys have a different view:
they see the raids as designed to intimidate and disrupt legitimate
political dissent – points on “the continuum.” It is a virtual
certainty that evidence of intrusive surveillance will surface as these
cases mature.

In Pennsylvania the continuum has meant, most recently, that the
state Office of Homeland Security contracted with a small outfit, the
Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, run
by a couple of ex-cops, one from York, Pa., the other raised
in Philadelphia and a veteran of Israeli law enforcement. For the past
year, the institute has been providing secret intelligence reports via
the state Homeland Security Office to Pennsylvania police departments
and private companies in order, the reports say, to “support public and
private sector, critical infrastructure protection initiatives and
strategies.”

Many of these reports focused
on groups opposed to Marcellus Shale drilling, which you may not have
known was a breeding ground for terrorism. In fact, you may not even
know what it is. But particularly in Pennsylvania and New York,
Marcellus Shale means big bucks. The shale is part of a 600-mile-long
geological formation containing a huge reservoir of natural gas. Energy
companies are seeking to exploit that formation in ways that have
raised serious and widespread environmental concerns. Ed Rendell,
governor of Pennsylvania, facing severe budget problems, wants to impose
a tax on the eager drillers. With Marcellus Shale, there’s something
for everybody – except for environmentalists concerned about the impact
of drilling on the Chesapeake Bay watershed and the Delaware River
basin.

Opposition from various environmental groups, then, has threatened to
spoil the party. What a surprise to find many of those groups mentioned
in one “counterterrorism” report after another. For instance, a report
on an “anti-gas” training session in Ithaca, N.Y., noted that the
group conducting the training (part of a radical environmental network)
was nonviolent, but should be considered dangerous anyway.

“Training provided by the Ruckus Group does not include violent
tactics such as the use of IEDs [roadside bombs] or small arms,” a 2009
institute report assured its no-doubt-relieved readers. “The Ruckus
Group does, however, provide expertise in planning and conducting
demonstrations and campaigns that can close down a facility and
embarrass a company.” To spell it out: this counterterrorist monitoring
institute was providing public-relations alerts for private energy
companies at taxpayer expense.

For nearly a decade, 9/11 has been used to justify this kind of
“intelligence” provided to corporate and private interests. Such
information may have nothing to do with terrorism, but it serves nicely
to illustrate how the protection of private profit has trumped concern
for real public security. What was missed as institute “analysts”
pondered potential Ruckus Group embarrassments to energy companies?

Rendell, who claimed
shock and embarrassment when the reports became public this month, has
now canceled the institute’s $103,000 state contract. He also insisted
that he knew nothing about the contract, and reaffirmed the right of
peaceful protest in the United States.

Not so fast. My colleague at the Philadelphia Inquirer Dan Rubin first reported
the institute’s questionable focus on July 19. At that time, the
state director of homeland security, James Powers, defended the
institute’s work, citing intelligence warnings about protests at the
G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last year. “Powers said that Institute
analysts posed in chat rooms as sympathizers of the Pittsburgh
Organizing Group, which opposed the summit, and learned where the group
would be mobilizing,” Rubin wrote. “‘We got the information to the
Pittsburgh police,’ he said, ‘and they were able to cut them off at the
pass.'”

How could Rendell not know about this? Among the many unanswered
questions to date: Who received these reports and for what purpose? The
state has declined so far to disclose a list of the recipients. But in
an e-mail
that Powers inadvertently sent to an anti-drilling group, he all but
admits that the intelligence operation, at least in part, served
corporate drilling interests.

“We want to continue providing this [intelligence] support to the
Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding
those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies,” Powers
wrote. (He resigned at the beginning of October amid ongoing criticism
over the institute’s reports.)

The Institute of Terrorism Response and Research was not alone in
monitoring the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, of course. The Pennsylvania State
Police also kept tabs on those potential demonstrators, funneling
information gathered into the state “fusion center,” its surveillance
and intelligence data hub.

Fusion centers are largely products of the war on terror, a result of
the massive waves of federal “security” counterterrorism funding that
flowed nationwide in the wake of 9/11. More than 70 such centers now
exist around the country, serving to gather “intelligence” from private
and law-enforcement sources and state and federal agencies. This
information is stored for future use as well as distributed to local
police, state police, private corporations, and various public agencies.

In the case of the Pittsburgh G-20 summit surveillance,
Pennsylvania’s fusion center passed its information on protests and
protest groups along to other local and federal law enforcement
agencies, intelligence agencies, and the U.S. military. (An instance of
this probably resulted in the arrest
of Elliott Madison, a self-described anarchist who was supposedly
distributing information to demonstrators via Twitter, an activity
applauded by U.S. authorities when utilized by Iranian dissidents, but
apparently frowned upon when employed stateside.)

The specter of bombs, vandalism, disruption, violence, and anarchy
infused these reports and hundreds of arrests were made during largely
peaceful protests. Civil rights suits have, not surprisingly, followed in the aftermath of the summit.

Names, Names, and More Names

Here is the continuum at work. A group is singled out by an
intelligence report – a Quaker “cell” opposed to the wars in the Middle
East, for instance, or opponents of Marcellus Shale drilling, or those
who disagree with G-20 policies. Once the group is identified, federal
agencies and state and local police move to insert informers in it
and/or aggressively investigate it. Such surveillance, whether done by
informers or by agents picking through trash bags, generates names.
Names go into databases and are networked nationwide. Databases grow.

Michael Perelman, one of the principals in the Institute of Terrorism
Response and Research, defended his group’s work by arguing that even
peaceful protests have security implications and that the institute did
not track individuals. This is disingenuous. The institute and the state
fusion center, officially known as the Pennsylvania Criminal
Intelligence Center, may work in parallel worlds, but their methods
mirror each other. The state fusion center, run by the state police,
provides access to law enforcement nationwide. Names of groups and
members of groups are its stock in trade, the meat of all surveillance.
In the same way, the state Homeland Security Office distributed the
institute’s reports to hundreds of agencies and private companies.

The tracking of legitimate political groups and people engaged in
lawful political activity is, of course, a fundamental corruption of
American democracy. Consider what happened in Oakland at the onset of
the Iraq war. A peaceful protest
at the Oakland port was met by police who opened fire on fleeing
demonstrators and bystanders alike, shooting wooden bullets and tear gas
canisters. In my book, Mohamed’s Ghosts,
I report that police had been alerted to potential violence by the
California Anti-Terrorism Training Center, a state fusion center
tracking political groups – exactly the same thing done by the
Institute of Terrorism Response and Research. About 60 people were
injured, including 11 longshoremen, and 25 protesters were arrested.
This event was justified by the fusion center’s spokesman who claimed
that a protest of a war waged against “international terrorism” is
itself “a terrorist act.”

But the story didn’t end there. A month after the initial 2003
protest, demonstrators, led by Direct Action to Stop the War among other
groups, held another Oakland protest to denounce the earlier police
violence. Leaders of that protest, it turned out, were undercover
Oakland police operatives who directed the protest’s planning. Deputy
Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan shrugged it all off,
saying it was important for his department “to gather the information
and maybe even direct [protesters] to do something that we wanted them
to do.”

The identification of dissident political groups, the gathering of
names, the manipulation of actual acts – these are the overt purposes
of surveillance and informing. In reality, the goal of all this furtive,
fervent activity is not to dismantle terrorist networks but to disrupt
legitimate civic and political activity – and especially, in the
post-9/11 world, to identify and infiltrate U.S. Muslim and Middle
Eastern congregations, civic groups, neighborhoods, and activist
organizations.

Toward that end, the FBI has moved to beef up
its ranks of informers. In its 2008 budget, the bureau sought more than
$13 million simply to vet and track more than 15,000 working
informants, and noted that new informants are signing up every day.
Information provided by those informants and by other increasingly
ubiquitous and sophisticated surveillance techniques is now funneled to
fusion centers – making it all just a mouse-click away from public and
private agencies nationwide.

In the 1960s, when Ernest Withers was an informant, such
computer-driven intelligence storage and distribution was only a gleam
in J. Edgar Hoover’s eye. Nevertheless, in Memphis, where Withers did
the bulk of his work, information he passed along
helped dismantle the Invaders, a radical group that saw 34 members
arrested. Withers also gave government handlers photographs of religious
leaders, political activists, and labor organizers, shadow portraits
for shadow profiles in the FBI’s burgeoning files. These were used by
law enforcement authorities in efforts to control the 1968 sanitation
workers’ strike that brought Martin Luther King to Memphis.

Withers’s image of striking Memphis sanitation workers holding aloft
an unbroken sea of signs reading “I Am A Man” remains as vivid today as
it was half a century ago. That a photographer who documented the
segregated South so powerfully labored as a police informer may seem an
unnerving contradiction. But Ronald Reagan also served as an FBI
informer. So did the ACLU’s famed First Amendment lawyer, Morris Ernst.
Gerald Ford, a member of the Warren Commission, funneled information
about the Kennedy assassination directly to J. Edgar Hoover as well.

Informers have multiple, often conflicting motives, and Withers, who
died in 2007, is not around to explain or defend himself. The report on
his activities during the civil rights movement, his betrayals of the
movement’s most prominent leaders, and his hand in destroying local
activist groups, however, is a powerful reminder of the long history of
political surveillance in this country and the corruptions and animus it
breeds. Whether it is the FBI’s use of informers within the civil
rights movement or the state of Pennsylvania’s monitoring of legitimate
dissent in the post-9/11 world, the ultimate victim of such activity is
American civil society itself.

The tainting of character, the undermining of basic trust, the
disruption of democratic politics – these are the great achievements of
state surveillance. Thanks to 9/11 and truckloads of homeland security
money, the stain of those achievements is now flowing as swiftly and
freely as streams of data on a vast fiber optic network.

[Note on sources: Analysis of the use of
surveillance and fusion centers at G-20 summits in Pittsburgh and
elsewhere may be found in .pdf file format here. Alarmist police reports disseminated on G-20 threats in Pittsburgh can be found in .pdf file format here. The 2008 FBI budget document can be seen in .pdf file format here.
The Justice Department’s Inspector General has just issued a report
examining the propriety of FBI investigation and surveillance of
domestic political activity; the report, well worth reading, can be
found, also in .pdf file format, here.]

The war on terror gives the government the pretext to surveille and infiltrate any group or organization. All Americans concerned with the rule of law and free speech should be alarmed. Of course, the surveillance state goes back decades and political authorities have sought to infringe our constitutional rights since the days of the Founders (see Alien and Sedition Acts). Unless government agents are held strictly accountable for their actions, abuses will be common, Indeed, they will become policy as they clearly have since 9/11.